Old News about Tailgating, Temple St.

Found this on my thumbdrive—it’s a blog post I typed at school and never posted (now about three weeks old):

A week ago Friday Tripp and I met for dinner on Temple Street. This is one of our favorite places in Hong Kong because the atmosphere is so unique. The Temple Street market is known for selling a smorgasbord of cheap clothes, fake DVD’s, jade, souvenirs, faulty electronics, at cheesy gifts at a premium price. It is definitely touristy, but the outdoor restaurants on all the surrounding street corners are quite authentic. The red tents light up the sky so it feels like it could be daytime once you’re under the merchant’s tarps. We passed a Chinese man yelling at people passing by to come eat at his restaurant. We took him up and sat at a rickety table with plastic stools after checking that the leaking air conditioners from the flats above would not be dripping on our food. I had a decent egg and prawn dish and Tripp had a disappointing beef and pepper plate, but we were really there to soak in the surroundings, anyways.

There were a remarkable number of Thai brides around, a recent discovery in my little world. I never encountered this phenomenon until I came to Hong Kong. A very young, beautiful foreign bride with generally little English knowledge married to a Western man. Often, Tripp and I will watch these couples interact because there can’t be a lot of verbal communication. I cannot speak for individual cases, but my limited Googling research makes it appear these women are highly motivated to find an older Western man to provide an escape from an impoverished background.
We wandered through the stalls, browsing old Chinese coins and tacky T-shirts, stopping to buy yall gifts and trinkets.

The Temple St. fortune tellers are semi-famous here. We didn’t have our palms read, but on a previous solo adventure to Temple Street, I sat in the tent with an ancient Chinese man to see what the future would hold. He opened his birdcage and a little bird picked my fortune from a stack of envelopes (the bit with the bird was very cool but the fortune was applicable to anyone passing by his booth).


Saturday I assisted Liza with her school’s Open Day, where the kids either curiously pointed their fingers at the new white girl or just called me “Miss Liza” as well. We were pretty much worn out after a full day entertaining kids and their parents, but that did not stop us from hosting a proper American football tailgate that night! Granted, it was held in a 500 square ft. apartment with no live band, fried chicken, boiled peanuts… or even a game! The USC/Arkansas game would have aired at one a.m. our time. So we did our best with what we had. We cleaned the apartment and set out a yummy dip Liza made—hot sausage, sweet chili sauce, and cream cheese! Yum! No Fritos here, so some off brand Ritz crackers worked instead. Tripp fired up the pull behind grill on the truck—I mean turned on the two eye stovetop—and made his mom’s amazing brats with peppers and onions. Everyone that came brought a dish to share, so we ended up with an array of chips, dip, fruit, cookies, and crackers! Basically I ate a ton, but isn’t that what we would do at a tailgate at home anyways?